An article on Intellectual Takeout, Mothers Are Not Widgets, points to an IMF working paper that states that, “if the gender [participation] gap were to be closed…, the level GDP [in Canada] would be higher by 4 percent.”

There are multiple flaws in their arguments. Primarily, there is the assumption that it is the participation of women, particularly well-educated women, in the workforce that increases productivity. More likely, it is the increased productivity that attracts well-educated women to participate.

The IMF paper also does not examine what sort of education those “well-educated” women actually got. Over the years, more and more women have gotten degrees in STEM fields, which are in demand by employers, rather than getting M.R.S. and pre-Wed degrees. Perhaps it is not that there are more educated women in the workforce, but that there are more usefully-educated people in the workforce. Adding more uselessly-educated women to the workforce would be of no benefit.

One striking point of the IMP paper comes in their discussion of demographics:

Why is gender equality an especially important economic issue now? The Canadian economy, like other advanced economies, is expected to face growth headwinds, arising from unfavorable demographic pressure. The Bank of Canada has assessed that labor input growth could be almost halved (from 0.7 percent a year in 2015 to 0.4 percent in 2020) due to the slowdown in the growth rate of the working age population (Bank of Canada 2016). But female labor resources have not been fully tapped, and policy reform to bring more females to the workplace could effectively counterbalance the demographic pressure that is predicted to rise in the future.

So their “solution” to the population collapse is for more women to be working, which would just accelerate the collapse of the population! Brilliant.

Liberalism and Feminism are literally killing off Western Civilization, and their solution is more Liberalism and Feminism.

But wait, they want more government-paid child care. So, leave your kids with a stranger to go to work so you can pay the taxes that pay the stranger to raise your kids.

The Intellectual Takeout article also quotes a prog woman who says that motherhood is selfish. Here’s the opening paragraph:

I was taking a few weeks’ break from work over the summer. My family and I — my husband and my sons, then 9 and 7 — planned to spend the time at our house on the New Jersey shore. When my mother asked what we would be doing on our vacation, I told her we would be together — going to the beach and the nearby amusement park, cooking, playing in the yard.

Motherhood is not selfish. Selfishness is refusing to have enough children to continue the civilization so that you can afford a vacation home at the shore.